Friday ::
Posted on | August 8, 2008 | 6 Comments
* An iced decaf latte tasted good today. This is miraculous.
* Bought orchids for my new studio space (we’re shuffeling rooms, repainting, etc.)
* My pants no longer fit, but I’m not really showing. In other words, I look chubby around my middle. So attractive. It’s all about the bella band now.
* Am excited to watch the Olympics tonight. They always get me motivated to do sports and to take better care of myself. Ironically–last time I was watching the summer Olympics, Bean was in my tummy.
* Bean used the words “actually” and “absolutely” in the same sentence today. It made me giggle. Now he’s digging gravel on the driveway with the geese looking on.
* I’ve decided all the little things matter. In a year from now I’ll forget what being pregnant was like. For the next little while, I’ll be focusing on minutia 
and perhaps starting to draw every day objects again. It’s somehow very grounding to bring my attention back to the little things. To take notice of food, small moments, errands, conversations.
Thursday ::
Posted on | August 7, 2008 | 10 Comments
More thunder. The kind that rips things. That takes your breath away. That follows the same jagged streak through the sky that the lightneing took.
Feeling slightly better today, but terrified that if I say so the horrible morning sickness gods will smite me down.
Watched the end of So You Think You Can Dance tonight, and every bone in my non-dancer body wishes I were a dancer. People tease me for loving the show–but they can only be people who haven’t watched. Because it’s not just entertainment, it’s art. Some of the dance pieces tonight made my breath catch. Its one of the few things I’d do differently if I could do my life over again. I’d dance. Instead I grew up in a very quiet home without any music that even remotely had a beat (read: my parents only played Vivaldi) and hence I have zero rhythm. Yet watching dance makes my heart sing.
If you could do something differently–if you could do your life over again–what would you do?
Wednesday ::
Posted on | August 6, 2008 | 4 Comments
I felt reasonable today, and as a result accomplished seven times what I have been typically accomplishing every day. As in: completed & turned in 2 manuscripts, finished an article, and completely set my classroom up. That last part took me almost the whole day. My back is rediculously sore from pushing metal desks and bookshelves around. I snagged to boys on custodial duty to move the really heavy stuff, but the rest I did myself. It’s too hard to try and visualize classroom feng shui with two teenage boys gawking about.
While I was sorting books rainclouds gathered. Suddenly it was ominously black out my window. Then the rain came pelting down in sheets. The smell of ozone came through the open windows, and then a crack of thunder so close I jumped. On the way home I passed the tree the lightening had hit. A huge branch had cleaved off an old maple–and had wrapped itself entirely around an electrical line. One thing New England weather isn’t is boring.
Also: Bean just went and got his shoes and then left the house with his guitar (an old beaten up acoustic guitar we’ve had around forever) saying “I’m leaving to go to a concert so I won’t be able to go to bed tonight. The concert will be really really long and I’ll be out really late.”
I have absolutely no idea where he got that idea.
Micro blogging
Posted on | August 6, 2008 | 6 Comments
So I’ve been both rediculously busy and rediculously sick. Still. Isn’t that sad? But in my state of near dispair I came up with a good idea: micro blogging. Of course twitter already came up with the idea, and I’m just a lame copy cat, but I decided that I’m going to try this month to blog as much as possible, about all the little things that I keep saying “I should write this down or I’ll forget,” and then I promptly forget.
Like this: Bean, in a conversation about how you can tell the difference between boys and girls said: “Girls have hair that goes flowing down. Boy’s hair mostly flows up. Occasionally boy’s hair goes flowing down too though.” Direct quote. Yes, he used the word occasionally. Can YOU think of a better three year old definition?
Or this: It is thundering every single minute right now. Not big huge cracks of thunder, but little bursts. The sky is pale and overcast, and of course, it has been raining. It has so far rained every single day in August.
And also this: for two days I felt better. I had an iced latte (tall) made by DH with maple syrup. It was divine. He also made biscuits (from scratch) and eggs. Everything tasted rediculously good. I was heady with the possibility of feeling like myself again. I accomplished eighty-nine things including starting to paint my new studio/office space (deep blue.) And then crash. Yesterday I was a miserable ball of ick. Beyond depressing.
Alright. That’s it. I’ll be back today. See, micro blogging means I am basically going to write everything down in little bursts like the thunder. We’ll see how long it lasts. A month? Maybe? (If I have internet in Colorado.) Anyone want to join me?
what do you do?
Posted on | August 2, 2008 | 11 Comments
What do you do when your kid is over tired. You know this as surely as you know it’s raining. He skipped his nap. Falls apart before dinner over a cracker, over putting his sweatshirt on, over cleaning up his blocks. What do you do when you make every attempt to put him to bed early on time, and you give him an extra long bath because it should calm him down…but by bedtime he is tightly wound. Over tired. Stubborn. He doesn’t like the songs you sing. He kicks his legs in your general direction. He wails when you leave after your promised one song and a snuggle. He gets up and follows you to the door, screaming, sobbing. Do you give in? Do you go back and calm him because you know he’s tired? Or do you insist, and not give in–this tantrum likely to lead to others. Bedtime already prolonged enough. What do you do? Because I don’t honestly know lately. He’s at this new stage, and its requiring all the patience I’ve got.
Snapshot
Posted on | August 1, 2008 | 5 Comments
Two years ago today I was watching gold finches and feeling rain. I was moving from rumpled sheets to shower, feeling my body linger on the cusp of sleep deprivation in the midst of Bean’s early toddlerhood. One year ago I was eating peaches and watching finches and feeling ready for anything. It’s funny, having a blog. It makes you return to your former selves, finding where you were at on this day or that, a year ago or two. It snares small moments in the weft of life; keeps them there even after memory grows fickle and occupied with greater things than the small fragments of a day.
I’m in such a different place this year, my body doing this crazy and miraculous thing. I’m sensitive and distracted and sporadic. Everyday is like the twirling flight of the bats I watch every evening. They come from within the eaves, darting about in the melon colored light of after sunset.
I’m unsettled, even as I’m content. I have this ridiculous urge to nest, to dig in, to just be in this small corner of land, and it feels so out of character to just want to be here. But the thought of traveling makes me want to tuck my knees to my chest and move closer to the softest pillows on the couch.
Here is all I want, with my cat curled next to me, her gentle purr making the air vibrate along my thigh. Yet I am hungry—for more than just this: curling towards myself, protective and quiet.
Hungry for art. I’ve spent so long without it, I feel an unfamiliar resistance at the thought of gathering up glue and scissors and paint. Hungry for running, and while I’ve gone for several runs recently, the days are too unpredictable and filled with nausea to make any of it a routine. Hungry for good food.
Inexplicably, I feel like I’m in a state of limbo now, a nine month limbo waiting for this little one.
Will it always feel this way? Like I’m holding my breath, like the two small lines of the pause icon have been stamped across my days? I am holding my breath, waiting, at the very least for this nausea to stop. It makes me a husk of myself. I linger in bed mornings without the gusto to rise.
It has also been a summer of rain which has left us always on tiptoe expecting summer to start. The grass is verdant and waist high in the meadows, but the air is always damp. Every day thunder. Every day out the window I watch the rain come up the valley towards us: a steel gray cloud against the paler blue of the summer sky. It arrives quickly, thrashing the leaves and pelting the windows.
And the garden, well, it’s rampant and wild. Tomato plants as high has my shoulders; little orange cherry tomatoes as sweet as sugar; beef steaks still green, and five other kinds, all in various stages of ripening. Beans by the colander full (should I blanch and freeze them?) Basil to be made into pesto; empty beds waiting where the peas and broccoli were—waiting for late summer seeds and early autumn crops, while I stay indoors writing, a deadline and a trip to Colorado for more writing with Pam before the month is out.
In late June the sky was light at nine. Now at quarter-to the sky is already indigo and the insects rattle their warning: summer is ending. Already, passing over the bridge at the end of the road, I saw the first red leaves on a maple. My heart flutters at this so soon turning. The ache of last season’s winter still clings close.
What were you doing last year, or the year before? How have you changed?
lame excuse
Posted on | July 31, 2008 | 15 Comments
Hi. I miss you. Yesterday was the worst day ever. I officially hate being pregnant.
Here’s to hoping today will be better. And that I’ll put up a real post.
a bumpy start
Posted on | July 28, 2008 | 3 Comments
I woke up with a crazy tension headache: the kind that makes everything seem like it the world should be painted in shades of pale blue. Made mint tea and sugar toast, and still I felt like crying.
The sun is out this morning though the ground is soft from too much rain. I am trying, trying so hard to will myself up off the couch and head outdoors with Bean to plant things in the garden, or take a walk with the camera, or even go upstairs and paint something, but so far all I can do is sit here feeling like a collection of glass shards in a paper sack
Bean is playing ‘hospital’ by himself in a nook across the living room. “I have to see if your heart is bumping mama,” he says with a pretend stethoscope in hand.
I turn away so he cannot see my eyes, suddenly hot with tears.
For the love of food
Posted on | July 26, 2008 | 17 Comments
I spent the day in the garden: discovering what weeks of rain and heat and neglect can do to leggy tomatoes and lettuces. Do you know that when a lettuce bolts, it shoots up four feet tall? I’ve learned so much from my garden this year—my first in this state, in this rocky soil and micro growing season. I planted too many lettuces at the same time, and now I’m stuck waiting for new seedlings to take hold and grow into big fat heads, while all the ones I previously planted were ready at exactly the same time and have now all grown bitter and bolted. I also planted far too many radishes and mustard greens, which grow wildly and rapidly bolted within a month. I left them in for a while, an invitation to the honey bees.
What I’ve loved and will repeat are the beautiful artichokes, the watermelons and pumpkins, the bush beans, tomatoes, and sweet peas. I used sticks from the woods to prop the peas up, and today harvested a colander full, which I shucked and had a lovely bowl full of jewel-green peas. Now the only question is how should I cook them?
The sad fact of the matter is that in addition to being a complete amateur gardener, I am even more of an amateur cook. I lack any and all ability to improvise in the kitchen, throwing a few ingredients together in a way that makes the flavors jostle and dance. And it’s something I’m not proud about at all. In fact, it makes me feel somehow very, oh, I don’t know, like a bad mother, to be honest.
DH cooks almost all of our food—he wooed me with oysters in white wine, polenta with chevre and sundried tomatoes, fried ravioli with sage, ridiculously tender steaks and new potatoes. But when push comes to shove his default foods tend to fall into two categories: meat and pasta, and after a while I feel like I should somehow be summoning the rich culinary tradition of my mother. She makes exquisite food using multiple grains and veggies and everything she makes is always exploding with flavor.
Her good food nourished me growing up, and gave me something I treasure: a truly healthy attitude towards food. I don’t eat for comfort; I can leave a half a cookie on my plate if I feel full; and I crave salad and fresh fruit over anything processed. But damn, for all that, I can’t cook anything. And it’s something that I want to change. I want to give Bean, and this new little Sprout the same kind of soul nourishment my mother’s food gave me.
Okay, so I can make practically anything if I follow a recipe, but I get daunted easily and NEVER know what to buy at the grocery store. Our refrigerator and pantry are always full and yet we never seem to have any ingredients to make anything. It’s a dire and sad state of affairs. How do I change this?
I’ve been thinking about food because my attitude towards it has been severely altered by this pregnancy: now everything is mostly unappealing. I have no cravings, and in fact have an aversion to almost every single food product you can think of. Truly, it feels like being cursed. I have perhaps never fully considered just how much I enjoy food. It’s both the ritual of eating together and the nourishment that I love about it, and I miss both with a vengeance. Bread products are the only non offenders.
So I have questions: how shall I cook my sweet peas? And also, how can I possibly go about learning to cook? Not crazy fancy stuff. Just simple wholesome meals using the foods I love: fresh local veggies and fruits, grains, nuts, etc.
If you love to cook, I want to know how you make meals? How do you plan? How do you purchase food for the week? How do you decide what to make for dinner—and make it without it taking two hours and using every pot in the kitchen?
Sometimes
Posted on | July 24, 2008 | 12 Comments
The thing about being married is that it tricks you into the slow, sedate delusion that you actually know the human being you are married to. Because I wake up next to him every morning, heck, I should know my husband like the back of my hand, right? (Although when I think about it, I’m not sure I could describe the back of my hand to anyone without actually LOOKING at it either.) For granted are two words that come into play here, with their accompanying ache and grayness, each syllable painted the color of the rain heavy sky.
And the thing is, for quite some time you can slip into a groove with another person. A routine gets built around you like a Lego fortress, and you’re there inside it, contentedly going about the brightly colored bits of your day. Coffee together in the morning, maybe. An easy push-pull exchange of laundry and dishes and getting things done. Then something happens and within hours, seconds, days, whatever, you’re standing facing each other with hot cheeks and fingers clenched wondering who the hell the other person is.
It will be nine years for us this September, and with the first warm days of summer and the lushness of foliage and leisure, we were in that kind of place. Soporific and content. I’d sit on the grass and watch him bring water to the chickens, and all I could think about was the way the muscles in his forearm bunched, and damn, life couldn’t get better.
Even with this baby curveball we’ve got going on, it is something we’re both into. Something that’s made us feel like a unit, a family beyond what we are right now, and we plunged into the long month of July eager with plans and complacent with delight.
Then the stock market went haywire (or perhaps more appropriately, continued to do so) and the upstairs toilet leaked so that kitchen ceiling started to drip and suddenly the veins in his neck were bulging and he was yelling in that way that makes everything flutter in the room. Then everything becomes unfamiliar and frustrating, like trying to translate your way through getting to the train station in a language you don’t speak. Even the gestures stop meaning anything, and you stand there flailing, holding on to some quiet small hope that you’ll still maybe make it to the platform.
We did this last night. All bitter and hissing the way cats are when they fight. The kind of empty exchanges that only serve one purpose: to protect oneself and not make a bridge, the kind that send shivers aching up your spine, the kind that if your pregnant and hormonal you cannot help but weep. I wanted to know where the hell all his aggression was coming from. He told me I had the intuitiveness of a three year old. We were beautiful together.
But thing about marriage is that you are in it to stay in it. It’s a funny little predicament actually, how it holds you to a moment, how it makes you bend towards the other when all you really want to do is run like hell in the opposite direction. It makes you keep taking a breath and trying again. And we’ve learned, over the years together, that we do really want to be in it. So we kept leaning towards each other until he was sitting on the floor next to my chair, rubbing my calf as I wiped snot on my sleeve.
I think men do things differently than women. I know this is not a light-bulb thought, but there are days when I feel like everything is so amicable and even between us that those lines of operating differently get blurred. But when it comes to friction the differences rear up ugly and unexpected, again and again, and it always takes us an hour or so of dodging each other and feeling completely hurt and baffled before we find ourselves there, salty skin on skin, together in a circle of lamplight in a dark room working things out.
The difference is that men initially don’t think they have anything to talk about, AND they take every question as criticism. I’m not saying they always do, but they often do, especially when it comes to matters of angst and hurt and importance.
“Why have you been so tightly wound?” I asked. But what he heard was: “You’re tightly wound, and that’s a problem.”
I said, “I want to understand why you freaked out about the leak—I know it’s a pain in the ass and you’re up to your neck in house projects—but what was with all that anger?” But what he heard was: “You dealt with the situation like an asshole.”
It took forever to get past all the defensiveness and interpreting to the disturbed bedrock below the muddy water. It took until he stopped feeling attacked and started feeling protective—one testosterone driven instinct overridden by another—and came and wrapped his arms around my heaving shoulders. And from there we could talk, and did, and then we went to bed like spoons, snug against each other, and the last thing I remember from last night was the sound of his heartbeat, steady and certain in the dark next to me.
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